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The Incentives of a Common Good-Based CSR for SDG’s Achievement: The Importance of Mission Statement

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Accountability, Ethics and Sustainability of Organizations

Abstract

The normative stakeholder theory is the most appealing approach for business in order to achieve the SDGs and an ethical corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, the incentives for managers to follow a normative rather than an instrumental approach to stakeholders’ management are unclear. Indeed, in both cases they have the duty to satisfy stakeholders’ interests (in the latter case with the aim to maximize profit, in the former with the awareness that stakeholders, as persons or groups, have needs and wants to be cared). The chapter would find out incentives for managers to implement an ethically driven CSR by linking the stakeholders’ normative concept to the common good from catholic social teaching (Argandoña 1998). Those incentives are intrinsic and transcendent needs to be satisfied together with the virtuous cycle generated by a business oriented to the common good. However, how could managers start orienting their business to the common good? Literature on mission statement gives the answer considering it as the main tool to spread ethics in business and orients firms to act in compliance with ethical principles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/

  2. 2.

    Paradoxically, the last statement gives “advantage” to the instrumental approach of stakeholder management on the normative one.

  3. 3.

    Represented by the author as the organizational core of the firm. It means that the firm identity takes rise from the set of values that reinforce and support the expected behaviors of the organization and its employees.

  4. 4.

    Statements or speeches suggesting the importance and the commitment that the firm attributes to the non-shareholders such as, for example, employees, consumers and society in general. These arguments then affect many business tools such as websites or annual reports and mission statement (Fairfax 2007).

  5. 5.

    32 missions out of 100 have not been assessed because of their non-existence or non-publication.

  6. 6.

    Paper presented at the 20th Symposium on Ethics Business and Society, IESE Business School, Barcellona (2018).

  7. 7.

    The work of a mum to take care of her man and children is the best example of fulfillment reached through human work.

  8. 8.

    Source: Business insider.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Law, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

    Cristina Quaranta & Emiliano Di Carlo

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  1. Cristina Quaranta
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Correspondence to Cristina Quaranta .

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Quaranta, C., Di Carlo, E. (2020). The Incentives of a Common Good-Based CSR for SDG’s Achievement: The Importance of Mission Statement. In: Brunelli, S., Di Carlo, E. (eds) Accountability, Ethics and Sustainability of Organizations. Accounting, Finance, Sustainability, Governance & Fraud: Theory and Application. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31193-3_2

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